Columbia’s administrators failed crisis management 101

University presidents have to wear a lot of hats, much like a CEO.

University presidents have to wear a lot of hats, much like a CEO. There’s the day to day admin, the glad-handing of donors, and, crucially, keeping internal fires from becoming public, violent conflagrations. That last one is a public relations lesson, one on which Columbia’s president might need a refresher. See here: To understand why so many college campuses suddenly have students occupying parts of their campuses, you have to go back to two weeks ago, on April 18, when Columbia University called in the NYPD to bust up an encampment that pro-Palestinian protesters had set up just a day earlier. In doing so, Columbia’s leadership threw out the playbook for managing protests that universities have honed for decades to keep students safe. “There is a particular set of tactics that many of us in academia thought was an understood logic that university administrators have used to manage and control protesters,” Sarah J. Jackson, a professor who studies the role of media and technology in movements for justice at the University of Pennsylvania, told me.